Egypt’s Military Rule: Is Krauthammer Satisfied?

The Headline on National Review Online’s “The Corner” blog said it all: “Toward a Soft Landing in Egypt: The key is the military.”

Charles Krauthammer’s op-ed was reprinted from his regular column in the Washington Post on Feb. 4, 2011 which ran under the same headline–but the subhead, “The key is the military,” was NRO’s flourish. Yet it was apt. At the height of the uprising in Egypt, Krauthammer, a sage of the neoconservative right, was heard all about town calling for Egypt’s generals to step in as the only adults on the scene.

“The worldwide euphoria that has greeted the Egyptian uprising is understandable,” he purrs with condescension in his 2011 WaPo missive. “All revolutions are blissful in the first days. The romance could be forgiven if this were Paris 1789. But it is not. In the intervening 222 years, we have learned how these things can end.”

We find out pretty quickly how Krauthammer, who more than once claimed that our own president should defer to “his commanders on the ground,” wants Egypt’s revolution to end. Or at least, how it should get to where it’s going:

The Egyptian military, on the other hand, is the most stable and important institution in the country. It is Western-oriented and rightly suspicious of the Brotherhood. And it is widely respected, carrying the prestige of the 1952 “Free Officers Movement” that overthrew the monarchy and the 1973 October War that restored Egyptian pride along with the Sinai.

The military is the best vehicle for guiding the country to free elections over the coming months. Whether it does so with Mubarak at the top, or with Vice President Omar Suleiman, or perhaps with some technocrat who arouses no ire among the demonstrators, matters not to us. If the army calculates that sacrificing Mubarak [through exile] will satisfy the opposition and end the unrest, so be it.

The overriding objective is a period of stability during which secularists and other democratic elements of civil society can organize themselves for the coming elections and prevail.

[Mohamed Mustafa] ElBaradei is a menace. [Hosni] Mubarak will be gone one way or the other. The key is the military. The U.S. should say very little in public and do everything behind the scenes to help the military midwife—and then guarantee–what is still something of a long shot: Egyptian democracy.

Krauthammer and other Washington neoconservative foreign-policy pundits would give their blessing to Attila the Hun as Egypt’s next ruler before they’d accept the leadership of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood. Krauthammer has said as much, here in this Dec. 2011 appearance on Fox News:

The problem is what Obama is doing now. Two weeks ago, I think a week and a half ago, he urged the generals to transfer power to the elected representative. That is disastrous. The military is the only guarantor of a Democratic system in the future, the same way that in Turkey the military for 50 years after the Ataturk revolution in the early ’20s guaranteed a secular, open society. If the military is gone, as Obama had urged, and it’s a good thing the military didn’t listen to him, then what you are going to get is the rule of the Islamists, who, as you say, if you add up the vote, that’s over 60 percent of the vote. They can essentially rewrite or write a constitution that could be extremely repressive.

FOX NEWS HOST BRETT BAIER: And are people in Israel concerned about that possibility, the real possibility that everything gets rewritten?

KRAUTHAMMER: Absolutely, everything is rewritten if the Salafist[s] and the Brotherhood are in power. You could get outbreak of war which could engulf the entire region.

To Krauthammer, a civilian, even secular transition would “be a disaster.” Instead, he turns to the military, which raised Hosni Mubarak up from chief of the Air Force and Egyptian deputy minister of Defence to chief air marshal to vice president in 1975. Unelected, he took over the presidency in 1981 after President Anwar El Sadat was assassinated. He was a creature of the military, which in turn lived off the spoils of corruption (and U.S military aid) throughout Mubarak’s 30-year dictatorship. When he was no longer of use during the turmoil of the revolution, the military let him go.

“Mubarak was just the tip of an iceberg, the key base of which was the army, and the army is still in command,” noted Professor Gilbert Achar of the University of London in an interview about the transition of power to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) on Feb. 11, 2011, not long after Krauthammer’s pro-military remarks.

Looking back at the past year, and especially the last several days, has Krauthammer gotten what he asked for, a military “midwife” of democracy? Just the opposite: the military appears to be strangling democracy in the cradle.

Gen. Mohamed El Assar -- AP

The “sweeping new powers” announced by the military (which last week imposed martial law on Egypt ahead of the presidential runoff) effectively give the military (SCAF) complete legislative powers, control over the budget, waging war, and who writes the permanent constitution. This came days after the High Constitutional Court (HCC) dissolved the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated parliament. SCAF also said it would not hold new elections for parliament until the new constitution is passed. Oh yeah, and the new rules effectively render the president a figurehead. There was also some confusing talk from one SCAF official who actually charged that whomever becomes president (to be announced Thursday) would be “a transitional one for few months only,” while SCAF officials separately and vaguely assured they would transfer power to the new president in a “grand ceremony” sometime at the end of the month.

The Muslim Brotherhood, which is claiming victory in the runoff, appears to be the biggest loser in all of this (right next to all those people who risked–and lost–their lives protesting in Tahrir Square for freedom against dictatorship last year). If the Brotherhood’s Mohamed Mursi wins, there will no doubt be a power struggle, with the military in the catbird seat. If the former prime minister and Mubarak appointee Ahmed Shafiq wins, then not so much. Shafiq, a former officer in the Egyptian Air Force, has been notably quiet about the military’s power grab. Meanwhile, the Brotherhood and the secular freedom movement have again taken to the streets.

And so why should Krauthammer be unhappy with this “soft coup” everyone is talking about? He nearly exclaimed his “soft approval” for it when he reasoned through the High Court’s dissolution of the parliament on Fox News Friday:

[The Brotherhood] could strike a deal with the generals. The generals have been in charge since 1952 and they were not going to go quietly. The reason they disbanded the parliament is because just a few days ago [parliament] appointed a 100-man committee to draw up a constitution. And that is the threat. So the parliament is gone, I’m sure the committee will be dissolved.

The problem is there’s going to be president election. There is no constitution that will determine whether it will be an empty presidency, a symbolic one, or a strong one, as happened in the past. So the army wanted to make sure that it could control the writing of a constitution which would determine the powers whoever wins on this Election Day. I think the army is going to stay in charge. It looks at the experience of Turkey, that the army stayed in charge for 80 years, and I think that is how it sees its role. It’s not going to go quietly.

So “the threat” was that the democratically-elected parliament established a committee to write the new constitution? It seems to me that Krauthammer would much rather the military, which has propped up a corrupt dictatorship for the last 30 years, write it. He can try to lipstick that pig all he wants, but it appears that what he wanted all along was a return to the status quo, and he just might get it.

One wonders if he would have asked for that same “military midwife” had he been present at our own constitutional birthing. Thankfully, in that case, the citizens, not his kind of “adults,” prevailed.

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22 Responses to Egypt’s Military Rule: Is Krauthammer Satisfied?

Let’s remove, for a moment, the problem Egypt faces from the all-consuming Israeli question which seems to animate both Krauthammer and this post. In general, Krauthammer has a point. Societies that have operated in one form or another under despotism for generations cannot be expected to adopt a local version of Anglo-Saxon democratic institutions over night. Notions such as common law protections, impartial courts, inviolability of contracts, etc., just don’t spring like Athena out of somebody’s head. Instead of attempting to impose “democracy” on these societies — which is only one form of government among many — it seems to me that we should encourage the establishment of liberty, that is, the right of the citizenry to live their lives according to the lights without subjection to government control. Krauthammer uses the example of Turkey under the eye of ever-watchful generals, and it is a good one. Turkey may not have been wholly democratic but it was generally a free society while the generals held their veto power. Now that it has become more of a “democratic” society and the generals are under arrest, that liberty — especially freedom of the press — is being severely curtailed.

Egypt has generations of work to do to establish a functioning liberal regime. However messy and awkward its progress may be, “democracy” is not its panacea.

Mr. Allison — Very respectfully, I disagree with your statement that the issue of Israel “animates … this article.” I, in fact, do not mention it once.

What does animate this article, however, is the desire to call an influential pundit out for encouraging a return to military rule as some sort of “midwife of democracy,” and then watching the whole thing unfold like a bad movie: the “adults” dissolving a democratically elected parliament just before the presidential runoff, the military taking by force (they have all the guns) the powers of legislation, budget, war and constitution.

This is an imposition of authority, the very thing you say you are against in your response to me. To wit: “instead of attempting to impose ‘democracy’ on these societies — which is only one form of government among many — it seems to me that we should encourage the establishment of liberty, that is, the right of the citizenry to live their lives according to the lights without subjection to government control.”

Krauthammer — and many Egyptians, no doubt — rue the prospect of an Islamist party at the helm of government, but if the Brotherhood wins by popular vote, they will have earned the responsibility and burden of guiding the country through a very tense period of awkward re-establishment after more than 60 years of a post-colonial military dictatorship. That military on Sunday, in one fell swoop, took the legs out of liberty’s first tiny baby steps, and I for one, an American who everyday enjoys the fruits of revolution, won by generals who stepped aside for democracy to grow, cannot deny the Egyptian people the same privilege, whatever I may think of the Muslim Brotherhood or any other party.

Excellent analysis Kelley. It was absolute madness to do what Krauthammer advocated in an earlier life; overthrow non-democratic states and impose what he thought would be a malleable puppet of the United States on to the defeated nation, after it was first fragmented. We saw how well that worked in Iraq and it is playing out in Afghanistan, to our detriment strategically and economically.

But it did light a fire in the minds of men, as I believe Bush said. People in the mideast believed they could actually govern themselves. Thus, the Arab Spring.

In Egypt, not the least of their gripes was Mubarrak permitting the Israelis to plunder their resources at cut rate prices, such as the natural gas deal. They saw this for the corruption that it was and which the American people are too blind or too stupid to see. We gave Mubarrak billions to line his pockets with and he would “sell” Israel natural gas for next to nothing, with the only losers being the Egyptian and the American people.

Now with the reimposition of military control, the corrupt sweetheart deals can resume. But the people around the world will now have no reason to doubt our hypocrisy. Al Qaeda can point and say that America and Israel will never allow an organic Arab democracy. A relatively moderate Islamist party that wins an election will not be allowed to govern. And the most extreme Islamists will continue to be the beneficiaries.

Krauthammer’s an idiot, but the notion that the way to liberty is through the Muslim Brotherhood or that liberty is likely to come Egypt anytime soon, is just as unintentionally funny as anything he’s ever written. From the beginning, given the state of these societies, the “Arab Spring’s” been an obvious halfway house to even an more deadly mix of mobilized totalitarian movements and violent anarchy. The people throwing matches on the fuel have (Libya, Syria, Yemen), and likely will continue to have (Egypt) as much blood on their hands, in shorter time periods, as the preceding governments, noxious as they were.

At the end of the day, there are no property rights in the Arab world. So there is no constitutional government there. Any national democracies erected in the middle east will be democracies of the worst sort.

1776 America doesn’t have any applicability to the middle east.

It seems like Krauthammer, the grand democracy promoter, is full of contradictions.

Iraq is fine, but Egypt is not.

The only influence democracy has had in Iraq is to increase extremism and instability. Democracy will do the same in Egypt.

The truth is that part of the degeneration of the American Right is “thinkers” like Krauthammer souring on the process of democracy. They still kind of believe in elections, at least under certain circumstances, but the messy give and take of democracy where sometimes the other guy gets his way is antithetical to the growing authoritarian mindset.

In this instance, the US media actually has the power to create a democracy- but won’t. It would take no more than disapproval of this coup for the Generals to back down. But at every step of their creeping, expanding power grab, the Generals have looked over their shoulders for the expected chorus of objections from the so-called “Free World” and have heard- nothing.

Krauthammer and his kind can’t abide the possibility of a democracy next to Israel, because public opinion in Egypt would never be friendly to an expansionist, militarist, ethnic dictatorship- and why should they? We would not. Except that- wait, we are.

Much better to quietly make sure that this first Egyptian election is the last. And that is what I predict. There will quietly, peacefully, be no more of that.

And there will be no objections from the US, because when it comes to principle, abstract ideas like freedom come well after important things like Israel’s security. And that goes for the media every bit as much as the ruling class.

Krauthammer, I believe, has become the leading neocon spokesperson in the media supplanting Bill Kristol and his chump change magazine because he’s gone back to a Kirkpatrickian realism about democracy and dictatorships upon which neoconservatism once rested. I think he realized the neocons got burned by delving into democratic utopia when it came to the Middle East and did realize that removing dictatorships did not mean Arab nations would turn into little Switzerlands. So it’s not surprising he supports the Egyptian generals to keep out the Muslim Brotherhood (which Obama does too).

What is surprising (or maybe shouldn’t be) is that this still is a case-by-case basis. While calling for Egypt’s generals to keep hold of power, he’s calling for the overthrow of the same kind of regime in Syria. Hafez al-Assad, head of Syria’s air force, took power in 1970 much the same way the military took over Egypt in 1953. Under the Assads, Syria became stabilized (although brutally so), the border between Israel and Syria in the Golan Heights has become one of the most peaceful in the world. Why would Israel (and their neocon supporters) want to change this for a destabilized Syria which could turn into stronghold of Sunni Muslim fundamentalism right on Israel’s border?

Because it’s all about Iran. In fact, even the war with Iraq was all about Iran. The fact that Israel and Iran, two main non-Arab countries in the Middle East, are swords point will go down as one of Israel’s biggest strategic blunders. Israel’s vanity at being the only nuclear power in the Middle East plus their continual obsession with the Lebanon snake-pit has put them on a collision course with a country they used to have friendly ties with and one which they could share common interests. Instead Israel (and the neocons are taking their cues from them) wants to see Assad fall because it would hurt Iran and hurt Hezbollah to see a fellow Shiite fall from power and cut that link.

This is why, in spite of Sunni Al Qaeda and 911 and the Saudi connection, the neocons have never had much enthusiasm for the War on Terror unless it involves something that hurts the Iranians. A big reason for invading Iraq was to put a U.S. ally and military base to surround Iran. If it came to a trade-off, the neocons would be willing to let our enemies get off scot-free if it meant lobbing a few at Tehran. That they’ve swallowed the Israeli leadership’s strategic madness and have been its spokesperson for it says a lot about them.

The world would be a much better place without Krauthammmer’s types meddling in it. People like this have no business dictating democracy anywhere. The apartheid state of Israel is proof enough that some people are not meant to rule over others, let alone given a country of their own.

@Uncle Vanya, That is almost comical coming from a country that has spent the last hundred years “shoving their kooks southward,” northward, westward, eastward and even into outer space trying to control the world and universe.

Nah, an anti-democracy, anti-freedom (and thus anti-American) authoritarian freak like Krauthammer won’t be happy until many, many more people have died. When the Egyptian military moves into Tahir Square firing their Washington bullets and killing thousands, then maybe it might draw a slight smile from Krauthammer. But maybe only then if he also hears that they captured thousands more and he learns the details of how they are being tortured.

Egyptians were always ruled by military rulers from Pharao to Husni Mubarak and from the middle age the rulers were from outside like the Persians,Greeks,Arabs, Mamluks, French, British and now the Americans and Israelis via Tantawi and 1.2 Billion to the military to carry out the orders. The Egyptian people has to rise above that to rule themselves. Needs much more courage and bloodshed which they never had after the fall of Pharaos 4000 years ago.

Great that he mentions Turkey. He shall do good to remember that Turkish generals conducted four different coups to remove democratically elected governments, including locking up thousands of political prisoners, some of which were tortured or executed on trumped up charges. In the meantime, they conducted comprehensive ethnic cleansing against the Kurds (which caused them their own blowback in the form of the PKK). The Turkish generals were never civilized by Western ideals of democracy; they were just contained by their pipedream to join the European Union (which for all its shortcomings, has a high standard for civilian control of the military, political freedoms and treatment of regional ethnicities).

Alas, Egyptian generals are not looking at Turkey. They’re doing more what Argentina’s generals did. And you can ask the Falklands Islands how it ended.

How do these people even sleep at night? (and yes, I spot the irony in posting this at this time)